


The wall

by Builder



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Current Events, Dark, Dystopia, Gen, Iraq War, Mentions of War, POV Nick Fury, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Politics, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Revisionist History, SHIELD, What-If, bradbury-esque, but this is serious, more like canon fuckery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-07-14 03:45:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16032308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Builder/pseuds/Builder
Summary: Sometimes the fate of the world rests on a single man.  And that man's fate rests in Nick Fury's hands.





	The wall

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @builder051

__________

Hey, you.  
Don’t tell me there’s no hope at all.  
Together we stand,  
Divided we fall.

–Pink Floyd, Hey You

__________

**26 June 2015.  1746 hours.  SHIELD satellite base, New York, New York.**

**__________**

“I don’t feel good about briefing him,” Nick sighs as he steps into the office.  “His head’s not in the right place for a mission today.”

“Hm?”  Maria looks at him over her newspaper.  She’s one of the few who still read the  _Evening Post_.  Sometimes Nick teases her for it, but calling someone  _old-school_  doesn’t carry a lot of weight around here.  “Why’s that?”

Nick nods toward the rainbow flags and triumphant headlines gracing the front page.  “He saw the news.”

“Hm.”  It’s more despondent than questioning this time.  And maybe a touch critical.  Maria sets down the paper.  “Why’d you let him watch it?”

“It’s not a question of letting him.”  Nick flops into his desk chair and pushes off with his heels, allowing a few feet of space to come between him and the clutter of files.  “He has free will.”

“That’s a joke, right?”  Maria raises her eyebrows.

“You know what I mean.”  Nick rolls his eye.  It doesn’t achieve much, save escalating his headache.  “It’s not…”

“HYDRA?”

“I was gonna say prison,” Nick says.  “You know I don’t like the comparison.”

Maria returns to her newspaper in stony silence.

Nick reluctantly scoots up to his desk and opens the top folder.  He scans the report for key words like  _confirmed kills_  and  _nuclear weapons_ , forcing himself to do the mental math and conclude whether or not the mission can wait until tomorrow.  The best he can do is guestimate.

“He might not know,” Maria says over the flutter of a turning page.  “Obergefell, Hodges…”  She shrugs.  “It’s not gonna mean anything to him.”

“Half the country doesn’t even know there are names associated with the case.”  Nick closes the file again and reaches for the TV remote.  The screen embedded in the wall of the office comes to life with CNN.   _Gay Marriage Legalized_  ticks across the bottom of the picture, which seems to be looping between the front steps of the Supreme Court and footage of every same-sex wedding to date.  He gives Maria a look that clearly says  _nice try_.

“Still doesn’t mean he’s distracted,” Maria says.  “I mean, how often do you guys talk current events?  And has he even mentioned his personal life?”

“Man…”  Nick shakes his head again, because that’s exactly the problem.  They’ve been at this too long.  It’s getting harder and harder to stick to the script when just stepping into the room puts a new set of words into his mind.

_Hey, Cap, good to see you.  Last time you were up was four years ago when you blew the head off the most wanted terrorist in the world, but SEAL Team Six got all the glory.  And the time before that was…  And the time before that…_

 

The red light beside the TV flashes, signaling something’s happening closer to home.  Nick quickly switches the display from network broadcast to the CCTV footage from the room down the hall.

The video shows him dressed in a t-shirt and pajama pants, his back to the camera.  Sharon stands in the open doorway with two Starbucks cups.  It isn’t clear if he recognizes her as an agent, but he seems to be treating her as a friend.  He takes the coffee and sips it.

The camera pans slowly, showing the rest of the living room while keeping Steve and Sharon in the corner of the frame.  The same CNN broadcast plays on the apartment’s grainy black-and-white TV.

Nick breathes in sharply.

“Wait.”  Maria raises her finger at him, keeping her eyes glued to the screen.

Steve thanks Sharon for the coffee.  Then, “ _Big day for the news, huh?  Never thought I’d live to see the day…_ ”

“ _Yeah_.”  Sharon nods blandly.

“See?”  Nick says.  “This isn’t gonna go down well.”

“She knows not to engage him,” Maria murmurs.  “Calm down.”

The camera pans back.  Steve puts one hand against the doorframe and shifts his weight, turning just enough for the hidden surveillance to catch his profile.  “ _Do you, um…?_ ”  Steve swallows.  “ _Are there any files on Sergeant James Barnes?  Or records I could see?_ ”

“That’s it.”  Nick brings his fist down on his desk.  “He’s not gonna be able to concentrate.  We have to abort.”

He doesn’t wait for Maria to concur.  He swivels around and jams the button on the wall, speaking into the intercom that connects him directly with the tiny device in Sharon’s ear.  “Code solstice,” he says.  “Effective immediately.”

He gets a quiet  _10-4_  in response.  The camera automatically stills and zooms in on the action.  Sharon has the syringe out of her pocket before her coffee hits the floor.  Steve sags immediately under the weight of the tranquilizer released into his neck.  His cup falls as well.  Nick radios for the orderlies in their vintage white uniforms to come in with the stretcher.  Then he radios for janitorial.

They’ve figured out a few decent narcotic stews over the years.  Usually Nick leaves the dosage up to the doctor on call, but today he makes a request for the minimum time unconscious coupled with the maximum forgetfulness.

It still takes a few hours, though.  The situation in the Middle East is getting desperate.  The Air Force wants to call in Stark, but Nick tells them to wait.  Plan A might still be tenable.  No need to resort to the end of the alphabet.

Finally the CCTV camera in the recovery room shows Steve stirring.  Nick has about ten minutes before the man’s lucid.  Maybe as few as seven.  Or as many as eighteen.  Nick hates that he knows that.

He tucks the specially prepared, oversimplified version of the mission file under his arm, stands up, and pushes in his chair.  He uses his palm print to unlock the door behind the false wall, then walks through the empty apartment and out into the hall.

He passes the door to Steve’s place, which still smells strongly of coffee and Pine Sol.  There’s a quiet clattering inside as the staging crew combs the place, removing any personal touches he may have added during his latest brief tenancy.

Nick winds through the building.  He’s made the trek enough times that the slow shift from residential to medical barely registers.  The nurse is outside the recovery room, tying on an apron to hide her push-up bra.  Nick nods to her.

“He’s gonna be up soon,” she says.

“I know.”  Nick stares at her for a moment.  The candy-striper smile stays glued to her cherry lips.  He knows she’s been trained well, but natural charisma has to have something to do with how she landed this particular assignment.  The girl before her had the same charm.

“I’ll do it this time,” Nick says.  He reaches for the doorknob.

“You sure?”  The nurse can’t tell him not to.  He’s her superior, and she’s probably too nice to say something contradictive anyway.

“Yeah.”  Nick opens the door.  “I’ll call you if I need you.”

The nurse beams.  But Nick doesn’t linger.  He steps over the threshold and takes a breath of the still air, chilled perfectly to 71 degrees and piped with faint essences of antiseptic and dust and old wood.

Steve’s face twitches when Nick shuts the door behind him, but he stays asleep, laid out neatly on his back with his arms by his sides.  Nick watches him breathe for a moment, then rounds the foot of the bed.

There’s a radio on the side table, the shell an authentic piece from the 40s, but the guts rebuilt with SHIELD’s latest tech.  The mp3 file of the baseball game is already queued up, just waiting for Nick to push play.

He doesn’t, though.  It feels like one cruel lie too many, even if it’s the mildest of the whole bunch.  Instead Nick slips one finger under the handle of the table’s drawer and eases it open.

The album inside doesn’t date back to the war, but it’s old enough now to be an antique in its own right.  Nick lifts it up silently and flips through the pages.  The pure existence of the yellowed news clippings and old photographs bring on nostalgia, regardless of the history they show.  A carefully curated history.  Only the good parts.  Only the parts they want him to remember.

Nick stops near the center of the book.  A man in uniform grins up from the page, the only one in the whole thing that shows someone other than Steve Rogers.  An article from the  _Times_  calls Barnes a hero in his own right.  Then there’s a reporter’s blurry snap of the empty casket being lowered into the ground at Arlington.  Nick sighs quietly.  Time to make an edit to the collection.

He holds the album flat and grips the page at the top corner, close to the book’s spine.  A page that’s micro-perforated, specifically for instances like this.  Because sometimes moments from the past have to be deleted in order to ensure the sanctity of the future.  Or in this case, an entire lifetime.

Nick folds the page as small as he can and tucks it into his pocket.  Then he replaces the album and shuts the drawer.  He sits in the spindle-legged chair beside the bed and bounces his knee as he waits.

“Where…?”  Steve swallows and rubs his eyes blearily, right on schedule.  He pushes himself up in bed.  The blankets slip down his chest.  “Where am I?”

It’s always the same question.  It makes Nick’s heart drop a little, seeing him so unguarded.  It goes to show Steve Rogers is still a simple man at heart.  Still a young man.  Still a man.

At least it makes it easy for Nick to stick to the script.  “A recovery room,” he says.  “In New York City.”

Steve looks around.  His eyes narrow.  “Where am I really?”

“A recovery room in New York City,” Nick repeats softly.

The next words flash in his mind’s eye in bold-face type before he speaks them, taking him back to the last time he said them, and the time before that, all the way to his first day on the program, when he had two working eyes with which to read what they proposed he say next.

“You’ve been asleep, Cap.”  Nick pauses.  “For 72 years.”

**Author's Note:**

> So. Where the fuck did this thing come from? Glad you asked. 
> 
>  
> 
> I've become seriously interested in the Vietnam War recently, and I've been doing a lot of research on it as I prepare a historical fiction Captain America AU. My work diverges greatly from then canon, but I know it's established in the MCU that during his time as the Winter Soldier, Bucky was involved in some historical military events between WWII and ~2014. 
> 
>  
> 
> Last night I was watching Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States, and, along with a cynical look at past events, the show shines the spotlight on a number of instances where the US government has been less than transparent about the true cost of military victories.
> 
>  
> 
> Somehow that got me thinking about Infinity War, and the cost of victory against Thanos, then about the possibility of time travel being introduced in A4, then about the link between history and time travel, and that got me on the strain of retro superhero revivals like the upcoming Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman 1984, and it all melded into this big what if?
> 
>  
> 
> What if the good guys aren't as good as we think they are? What if every comic incarnation of Cap could be accurate within the MCU? What if they all existed simultaneously in a Bradbury-esque dystopian offshoot of the universe we've all come to know and love.
> 
>  
> 
> Also I'd recently heard a short story on NPR called The Penguin Goes A Courtin' (you can listen to it here: https://beta.prx.org/stories/726?play=true) in which the author details the origin of Batman in this darkly hilarious AU character 'verse where Bruce Wayne, the Penguin, and Mary Poppins are all at a dinner party, and I wanted to write something just as good as that piece (but way less humorous).


End file.
